


night

by jenny68



Category: bts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24493198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny68/pseuds/jenny68





	night

A NEW TRANSLATION MBT MARION WIESEL  
WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR  
ELIE WIESEL  
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE  
"A slim volume of terrifying power."  
\- The New York Times  
Book OPRAH'S  
Club  
Copyrighted Material  
Also by Elie Wiesel  
DAWN  
DAY (previously THE ACCIDENT)  
THE TOWN BEYOND THE WALL  
THE GATES OF THE FOREST  
THE JEWS OF SILENCE  
LEGENDS OF OUR TIME  
A BEGGAR IN JERUSALEM  
ONE GENERATION AFTER  
SOULS ON FIRE  
THE OATH  
ANI MAAMIN (cantata)  
ZALMEN, OR THE MADNESS OF GOD  
(play)  
MESSENGERS OF GOD  
A JEW TODAY  
FOUR HASIDIC MASTERS  
THE TRIAL OF GOD (play)  
THE TESTAMENT  
FIVE BIBLICAL PORTRAITS  
SOMEWHERE A MASTER  
THE GOLEM (illustrated by Mark  
Podwal)  
THE FIFTH SON  
AGAINST SILENCE (edited by Irving  
Abrahamson)  
THE OSLO ADDRESS  
TWILIGHT  
THE SIX DAYS OF DESTRUCTION  
(with Albert Friedlander)  
A JOURNEY INTO FAITH  
(conversations with John Cardinal O'Connor)  
A SONG FOR HOPE (cantata)  
FROM THE KINGDOM OF MEMORY  
SAGES AND DREAMERS  
THE FORGOTTEN  
A PASSOVER HAGGADAH (illustrated  
by Mark Podwal)  
ALL RIVERS RUN TO THE SEA  
MEMOIR IN TWO VOICES (with  
François Mitterand)  
KING SOLOMON AND HIS MAGIC  
RING (illustrated by Mark  
Podwal)  
AND THE SEA IS NEVER FULL  
THE JUDGES  
CONVERSATIONS WITH ELIE WIESEL (with Richard D.  
Heffner)  
WISE MEN AND THEIR TALES  
THE TIME OF THE UPROOTED  
Night  
ELIE WIESEL  
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MARION WIESEL  
HILL AND WANG  
A DIVISION OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX  
NEW YORK  
Hill and Wang  
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux  
19 Union Square West, New York 10003  
Copyright © 1958 by Les Editions de Minuit  
Translation copyright © 2006 by Marion Wiesel  
Preface to the New Translation copyright © 2006 by Elie Wiesel  
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech copyright © 1986 by the Nobel Foundation  
All rights reserved  
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.  
Printed in the United States of America  
Published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback by Hill and Wang  
First edition of this translation, 2006  
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005936797  
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-374-39997-9  
Hardcover ISBN-10:0-374-39997-2 Paperback ISBN-13:9 78-0-3 74-50001-6 Paperback ISBN-10:0-374-50001-0  
Designed by Abby Kagan  
www.fsgbooks.com  
17 19 20 18 16  
In memory of my parents and of my little sister, Tzipora  
E.W.  
This new translation in memory of my grandparents, Abba, Sarah and Nachman, who also vanished into that night  
M.W.  
Preface to the New Translation by Elie Wiesel  
IF IN MY LIFETIME I WAS TO WRITE only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writ- ings after Night, including those that deal with biblical, Tal- mudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works.  
Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terri- fying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?  
Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, to help prevent history from repeating itself?  
Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one's knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature?  
There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don't know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Cer- tainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me,  
why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival. Was it to protect that meaning that I set to paper an experience in which nothing made any sense?  
In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer—or my life, period— would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoy- ing one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.  
For today, thanks to recently discovered documents, the evi- dence shows that in the early days of their accession to power, the Nazis in Germany set out to build a society in which there simply would be no room for Jews. Toward the end of their reign, their goal changed: they decided to leave behind a world in ruins in which Jews would seem never to have existed. That is why every- where in Russia, in the Ukraine, and in Lithuania, the Einsatz- gruppen carried out the Final Solution by turning their machine guns on more than a million Jews, men, women, and children, and throwing them into huge mass graves, dug just moments before by the victims themselves. Special units would then disinter the corpses and burn them. Thus, for the first time in history, Jews were not only killed twice but denied burial in a cemetery.  
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and chil- dren, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tra- dition, therefore Jewish memory.  
CONVINCED THAT THIS PERIOD in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while  
I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as lan- guage became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be neces- sary to invent a new language. But how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was "it"? "It" was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless. Was there a way to describe the last jour- ney in sealed cattle cars, the last voyage toward the unknown? Or the discovery of a demented and glacial universe where to be in- human was human, where disciplined, educated men in uniform came to kill, and innocent children and weary old men came to die? Or the countless separations on a single fiery night, the tear- ing apart of entire families, entire communities? Or, incredibly, the vanishing of a beautiful, well-behaved little Jewish girl with golden hair and a sad smile, murdered with her mother the very night of their arrival? How was one to speak of them without trembling and a heart broken for all eternity?  
Deep down, the witness knew then, as he does now, that his testimony would not be received. After all, it deals with an event that sprang from the darkest zone of man. Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.But would they at least understand?  
Could men and women who consider it normal to assist the weak, to heal the sick, to protect small children, and to respect  
the wisdom of their elders understand what happened there? Would they be able to comprehend how, within that cursed uni- verse, the masters tortured the weak and massacred the children, the sick, and the old?  
And yet, having lived through this experience, one could not keep silent no matter how difficult, if not impossible, it was to speak.  
And so I persevered. And trusted the silence that envelops and transcends words. Knowing all the while that any one of the fields of ashes in Birkenau carries more weight than all the testi- monies about Birkenau. For, despite all my attempts to articulate the unspeakable, "it" is still not right.  
Is that why my manuscript—written in Yiddish as "And the World Remained Silent" and translated first into French, then into English—was rejected by every major publisher, French and American, despite the tireless efforts of the great Catholic French writer and Nobel laureate François Mauriac? After months and months of personal visits, letters, and telephone calls, he finally succeeded in getting it into print.  
Though I made numerous cuts, the original Yiddish version still was long. Jérôme Lindon, the legendary head of the small but prestigious Éditions de Minuit, edited and further cut the French version. I accepted his decision because I worried that some things might be superfluous. Substance alone mattered. I was more afraid of having said too much than too little.  
Example: in the Yiddish version, the narrative opens with these cynical musings:  
In the beginning there was faith—which is childish; trust—which is vain; and illusion—which is dangerous.  
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illu-  
sion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekhinah's flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and in his soul a reflection of God's image.  
That was the source if not the cause of all our ordeals.  
Other passages from the original Yiddish text had more on the death of my father and on the Liberation. Why not include those in this new translation? Too personal, too private, perhaps; they need to remain between the lines. And yet...  
I remember that night, the most horrendous of my life:  
...Eliezer, my son, come here... I want to tell you something...Onlytoyou...Come, don't leave me alone...Eliezer..."  
I heard his voice, grasped the meaning of his words and the tragic dimension of the moment, yet I did not move.  
It had been his last wish to have me next to him in his agony, at the moment when his soul was tearing itself from his lacerated body—yet I did not let him have his wish.  
I was afraid.  
Afraid of the blows. That was why I remained deaf to his cries. Instead of sacrificing my miserable life and rushing to his side, taking his hand, reassuring him, showing him that he was not abandoned, that I was near him, that I felt his sorrow, instead of all that, I remained flat on my back, asking God to make my father stop calling my name, to make him stop crying. So afraid was I to incur the wrath of the SS.  
In fact, my father was no longer conscious.  
Yet his plaintive, harrowing voice went on piercing the si- lence and calling me, nobody but me.  
"Well?" The SS had flown into a rage and was striking my father on the head: "Be quiet, old man! Be quiet!"  
My father no longer felt the club's blows; I did. And yet I did not react. I let the SS beat my father, I left him alone in the clutches of death. Worse: I was angry with him for having been noisy, for having cried, for provoking the wrath of the SS.  
"Eliezer! Eliezer! Come, don't leave me a l o n e ... " His voice had reached me from so far away, from so close. But I had not moved.  
I shall never forgive myself. Nor shall I ever forgive the world for having pushed me against the wall, for having turned me into a stranger, for having awakened in me the basest, most primitive instincts.  
His last word had been my name. A summons. And I had not  
responded.  
In the Yiddish version, the narrative does not end with the im- age in the mirror, but with a gloomy meditation on the present:  
And now, scarcely ten years after Buchenwald, I realize that the world forgets quickly. Today, Germany is a sovereign state. The German Army has been resuscitated. Use Koch, the notorious sadistic monster of Buchenwald, was allowed to have children and live happily ever after...War criminals stroll through the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past seems to have been erased, relegated to oblivion.  
Today, there are anti-Semites in Germany, France, and even the United States who tell the world that the "story" of six mil- lion assassinated Jews is nothing but a hoax, and many people, not knowing any better, may well believe them, if not today then tomorrow or the day after...  
I am not so naive as to believe that this slim volume will  
change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world.Books no longer have the power they once did.  
Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.  
THE READER would be entitled to ask: Why this new translation, since the earlier one has been around for forty-five years? If it is not faithful or not good enough, why did I wait so long to replace it with one better and closer to the original?  
In response, I would say only that back then, I was an un- known writer who was just getting started. My English was far from good. When my British publisher told me that he had found a translator, I was pleased. I later read the translation and it seemed all right. I never reread it. Since then, many of my other works have been translated by Marion, my wife, who knows my voice and how to transmit it better than anyone else. I am fortu- nate: when Farrar, Straus and Giroux asked her to prepare a new translation, she accepted. I am convinced that the readers will ap- preciate her work. In fact, as a result of her rigorous editing, I was able to correct and revise a number of important details.  
And so, as I reread this text written so long ago, I am glad that I did not wait any longer. And yet, I still wonder: Have I used the right words? I speak of my first night over there. The discovery of the reality inside the barbed wire. The warnings of a "veteran" inmate, counseling my father and myself to lie about our ages: my father was to make himself younger, and I older. The selection. The march toward the chimneys looming in the distance under an indifferent sky. The infants thrown into fiery ditches... I did not say that they were alive, but that was what I thought. But then I convinced myself: no, they were dead, otherwise I surely would have lost my mind. And yet fellow inmates also saw them; they  
were alive when they were thrown into the flames. Historians, among them Telford Taylor, confirmed it. And yet somehow I did not lose my mind.  
BEFORE CONCLUDING this introduction, I believe it important to emphasize how strongly I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.  
Earlier, I described the difficulties encountered by Night be- fore its publication in French, forty-seven years ago. Despite overwhelmingly favorable reviews, the book sold poorly. The sub- ject was considered morbid and interested no one. If a rabbi hap- pened to mention the book in his sermon, there were always people ready to complain that it was senseless to "burden our children with the tragedies of the Jewish past."  
Since then, much has changed. Night has been received in ways that I never expected. Today, students in high schools and colleges in the United States and elsewhere read it as part of their curriculum.  
How to explain this phenomenon? First of all, there has been a powerful change in the public's attitude. In the fifties and sixties, adults born before or during World War II showed a careless and patronizing indifference toward what is so inade- quately called the Holocaust. That is no longer true.  
Back then, few publishers had the courage to publish books on that subject.  
Today, such works are on most book lists. The same is true in academia. Back then, few schools offered courses on the subject. Today, many do. And, strangely, those courses are particularly popular. The topic of Auschwitz has become part of mainstream culture. There are films, plays, novels, international conferences, exhibitions, annual ceremonies with the participation of the na-  
tion's officialdom. The most striking example is that of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; it has received more than twenty-two million visitors since its inauguration in 1993.  
This may be because the public knows that the number of survivors is shrinking daily, and is fascinated by the idea of shar- ing memories that will soon be lost. For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its conse- quences.  
For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to de- prive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.  
SOMETIMES I AM ASKED if I know "the response to Auschwitz"; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response. What I do know is that there is "response" in responsibility. When we speak of this era of evil and darkness, so close and yet so distant, "responsibil- ity" is the key word.  
The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of to- day, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.  
E.W.  
Foreword by François Mauriac  
FOREIGN JOURNALISTS frequently come to see me. I am wary of them, torn as I am between my desire to speak to them freely and the fear of putting weapons into the hands of interviewers whose attitude toward France I do not know. During these encounters, I tend to be on my guard.  
That particular morning, the young Jew who came to inter- view me on behalf of a Tel Aviv daily won me over from the first moment. Our conversation very quickly became more personal. Soon I was sharing with him memories from the time of the Occu- pation. It is not always the events that have touched us personally that affect us the most. I confided to my young visitor that noth- ing I had witnessed during that dark period had marked me as deeply as the image of cattle cars filled with Jewish children at the Austerlitz train station...Yet I did not even see them with my own eyes. It was my wife who described them to me, still un- der the shock of the horror she had felt. At that time we knew nothing about the Nazis' extermination methods. And who could have imagined such things! But these lambs torn from their mothers, that was an outrage far beyond anything we would have  
thought possible. I believe that on that day, I first became aware of the mystery of the iniquity whose exposure marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. The dream conceived by Western man in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he had glimpsed in 1789, and which until August 2, 1914, had be- come stronger with the advent of the Enlightenment and scien- tific discoveries—that dream finally vanished for me before those trainloads of small children. And yet I was still thousands of miles away from imagining that these children were destined to feed the gas chambers and crematoria.  
This, then, was what I probably told this journalist. And when I said, with a sigh, "I have thought of these children so many times!" he told me, "I was one of them." He was one of them! He had seen his mother, a beloved little sister, and most of his family, except his father and two other sisters, disappear in a furnace fueled by living creatures. As for his father, the boy had to witness his martyrdom day after day and, finally, his agony and death. And what a death! The circumstances of it are narrated in this book, and I shall allow readers—who should be as numer- ous as those reading The Diary of Anne Frank—to discover them for themselves as well as by what miracle the child himself escaped.  
I maintain therefore that this personal record, coming as it does after so many others and describing an abomination such as we might have thought no longer had any secrets for us, is differ- ent, distinct, and unique nevertheless. The fate of the Jews of the small town in Transylvania called Sighet; their blindness as they confronted a destiny from which they would have still had time to flee; the inconceivable passivity with which they surrendered to it, deaf to the warnings and pleas of a witness who, having es- caped the massacre, relates to them what he has seen with his own eyes, but they refuse to believe him and call him a mad-  
man—this set of circumstances would surely have sufficed to in- spire a book to which, I believe, no other can be compared.  
It is, however, another aspect of this extraordinary book that has held my attention. The child who tells us his story here was one of God's chosen. From the time he began to think, he lived only for God, studying the Talmud, eager to be initiated into the Kabbalah, wholly dedicated to the Almighty. Have we ever con- sidered the consequence of a less visible, less striking abomina- tion, yet the worst of all, for those of us who have faith: the death of God in the soul of a child who suddenly faces absolute evil?  
Let us try to imagine what goes on in his mind as his eyes watch rings of black smoke unfurl in the sky, smoke that em- anates from the furnaces into which his little sister and his mother had been thrown after thousands of other victims:  
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.  
Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.  
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for- ever.Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.  
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.  
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.  
Never.  
It was then that I understood what had first appealed to me about this young Jew: the gaze of a Lazarus risen from the dead  
yet still held captive in the somber regions into which he had strayed, stumbling over desecrated corpses. For him, Nietzsche's cry articulated an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness and consolation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had, under the watchful gaze of this child, vanished for- ever into the smoke of the human holocaust demanded by the Race, the most voracious of all idols.  
And how many devout Jews endured such a death? On that most horrible day, even among all those other bad days, when the child witnessed the hanging (yes!) of another child who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel, he heard someone behind him groan:  
"For God's sake, where is God?"  
And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gal- lows."  
On the last day of the Jewish year, the child is present at the solemn ceremony of Rosh Hashanah. He hears thousands of slaves cry out in unison, "Blessed be the Almighty!" Not so long ago, he too would have knelt down, and with such worship, such awe, such love! But this day, he does not kneel, he stands. The human creature, humiliated and offended in ways that are in- conceivable to the mind or the heart, defies the blind and deaf divinity.  
I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the ac- cused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this  
Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.  
And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflec- tion of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cor- nerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfath- omable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and the slaugh- terhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him. That is what I should have said to the Jew- ish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep.  
Night1  
T  
2  
THEY CALLED HIM Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname. He was the jack-of- all-trades in a Hasidic house of prayer, a shtibl. The Jews of Sighet—the little town in Transylvania where I spent my child- hood—were fond of him. He was poor and lived in utter penury. As a rule, our townspeople, while they did help the needy, did not particularly like them. Moishe the Beadle was the excep- tion. He stayed out of people's way. His presence bothered no one. He had mastered the art of rendering himself insignificant, invisible.  
Physically, he was as awkward as a clown. His waiflike shyness made people smile. As for me, I liked his wide, dreamy eyes, gaz- ing off into the distance. He spoke little. He sang, or rather he chanted, and the few snatches I caught here and there spoke of divine suffering, of the Shekhinah in Exile, where, according to Kabbalah, it awaits its redemption linked to that of man.  
I met him in 1941. I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the syna- gogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple.  
3  
One day I asked my father to find me a master who could guide me in my studies of Kabbalah. "You are too young for that. Maimonides tells us that one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism, a world fraught with peril. First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend."  
My father was a cultured man, rather unsentimental. He rarely displayed his feelings, not even within his family, and was more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin. The Jewish community of Sighet held him in highest esteem; his advice on public and even private matters was frequently sought. There were four of us children. Hilda, the eldest; then Bea; I was the third and the only son; Tzipora was the youngest.  
My parents ran a store. Hilda and Bea helped with the work. As for me, my place was in the house of study, or so they said.  
"There are no Kabbalists in Sighet," my father would often tell me.  
He wanted to drive the idea of studying Kabbalah from my mind. In vain. I succeeded on my own in finding a master for my- self in the person of Moishe the Beadle.  
He had watched me one day as I prayed at dusk. "Why do you cry when you pray?" he asked, as though he knew me well.  
"I don't know," I answered, troubled. I had never asked myself that question. I cried because because something inside me felt the need to cry. That was all I knew.  
"Why do you pray?" he asked after a moment. Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?  
"I don't know," I told him, even more troubled and ill at ease. "I don't know."  
From that day on, I saw him often. He explained to me, with  
4  
great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer...  
Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don't understand His replies. We cannot under- stand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and re- main there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself.  
"And why do you pray, Moishe?" I asked him. "I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions."  
We spoke that way almost every evening, remaining in the synagogue long after all the faithful had gone, sitting in the semi- darkness where only a few half-burnt candles provided a flicker- ing light.  
One evening, I told him how unhappy I was not to be able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar, the Kabbalistic works, the secrets of Jewish mysticism. He smiled indulgently. After a long silence, he said, "There are a thousand and one gates allowing entry into the orchard of mystical truth. Every human being has his own gate. He must not err and wish to enter the or- chard through a gate other than his own. That would present a danger not only for the one entering but also for those who are already inside."  
And Moishe the Beadle, the poorest of the poor of Sighet, spoke to me for hours on end about the Kabbalah's revelations and its mysteries. Thus began my initiation. Together we would read, over and over again, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart but to discover within the very essence of divinity.  
And in the course of those evenings I became convinced that Moishe the Beadle would help me enter eternity, into that time when question and answer would become ONE.  
5  
AND THEN, one day all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet. And Moishe the Beadle was a foreigner.  
Crammed into cattle cars by the Hungarian police, they cried silently. Standing on the station platform, we too were crying. The train disappeared over the horizon; all that was left was thick, dirty smoke.  
Behind me, someone said, sighing, "What do you expect? That's w a r ... "  
The deportees were quickly forgotten. A few days after they left, it was rumored that they were in Galicia, working, and even that they were content with their fate.  
Days went by. Then weeks and months. Life was normal again. A calm, reassuring wind blew through our homes. The shopkeepers were doing good business, the students lived among their books, and the children played in the streets.  
One day, as I was about to enter the synagogue, I saw Moishe the Beadle sitting on a bench near the entrance.  
He told me what had happened to him and his companions. The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once in Polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. There every- body was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their pris- oners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place in the Galician forest, near Kolo- may. How had he, Moishe the Beadle, been able to escape? By a miracle. He was wounded in the leg and left for dead...  
6  
Day after day, night after night, he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story and that of Malka, the young girl who lay dying for three days, and that of Tobie, the tailor who begged to die before his sons were killed.  
Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Oth- ers flatly said that he had gone mad.  
As for Moishe, he wept and pleaded: "Jews, listen to me! That's all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!" he kept shouting in synagogue, between the prayer at dusk and the evening prayer.  
Even I did not believe him. I often sat with him, after ser- vices, and listened to his tales, trying to understand his grief. But all I felt was pity.  
"They think I'm mad," he whispered, and tears, like drops of wax, flowed from his eyes.  
Once, I asked him the question: "Why do you want people to believe you so much? In your place I would not care whether they believed me or n o t ... "  
He closed his eyes, as if to escape time. "You don't understand," he said in despair. "You cannot under- stand. I was saved miraculously. I succeeded in coming back. Where did I get my strength? I wanted to return to Sighet to describe to you my death so that you might ready yourselves while there is still time. Life? I no longer care to live. I am alone. But I wanted to come back to warn you. Only no one is listening to me ..."  
This was toward the end of 1942. Thereafter, life seemed normal once again. London radio, which we listened to every evening, announced encouraging  
7  
news: the daily bombings of Germany and Stalingrad, the prepa- ration of the Second Front. And so we, the Jews of Sighet, waited for better days that surely were soon to come.  
I continued to devote myself to my studies, Talmud during the day and Kabbalah at night. My father took care of his business and the community. My grandfather came to spend Rosh Ha- shanah with us so as to attend the services of the celebrated Rebbe of Borsche. My mother was beginning to think it was high time to find an appropriate match for Hilda.  
Thus passed the year 1943.  
SPRING 1944. Splendid news from the Russian Front. There could no longer be any doubt: Germany would be defeated. It was only a matter of time, months or weeks, perhaps.  
The trees were in bloom. It was a year like so many others, with its spring, its engagements, its weddings, and its births.  
The people were saying, "The Red Army is advancing with giant strides...Hitler will not be able to harm us, even if he wants t o ... "  
Yes, we even doubted his resolve to exterminate us. Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means? In the middle of the twentieth century!  
And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manner of things—strategy, diplomacy, politics, and Zionism—but not with their own fate.  
Even Moishe the Beadle had fallen silent. He was weary of talking. He would drift through synagogue or through the streets, hunched over, eyes cast down, avoiding people's gaze.  
In those days it was still possible to buy emigration certificates  
8  
to Palestine. I had asked my father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave.  
"I am too old, my son," he answered. "Too old to start a new life. Too old to start from scratch in some distant l a n d ... "  
Budapest radio announced that the Fascist party had seized power. The regent Miklós Horthy was forced to ask a leader of the pro-Nazi Nyilas party to form a new government.  
Yet we still were not worried. Of course we had heard of the Fascists, but it was all in the abstract. It meant nothing more to us than a change of ministry.  
The next day brought really disquieting news: German troops had penetrated Hungarian territory with the government's approval. Finally, people began to worry in earnest. One of my friends, Moishe Chaim Berkowitz, returned from the capital for Passover and told us, "The Jews of Budapest live in an atmosphere of fear and terror. Anti-Semitic acts take place every day, in the streets, on the trains. The Fascists attack Jewish stores, synagogues. The situation is becoming very s e r i o u s ... "  
The news spread through Sighet like wildfire. Soon that was all people talked about. But not for long. Optimism soon revived: The Germans will not come this far. They will stay in Budapest. For strategic reasons, for political reasons ...  
In less than three days, German Army vehicles made their appearance on our streets.  
ANGUISH. German soldiers—with their steel helmets and their death's-head emblem. Still, our first impressions of the Germans were rather reassuring. The officers were billeted in private homes, even in Jewish homes. Their attitude toward their hosts was distant but polite. They never demanded the impossible,  
9  
made no offensive remarks, and sometimes even smiled at the lady of the house. A German officer lodged in the Kahns' house across the street from us. We were told he was a charming man, calm, likable, and polite. Three days after he moved in, he brought Mrs. Kahn a box of chocolates. The optimists were jubi- lant: "Well? What did we tell you? You wouldn't believe us. There they are, your Germans. What do you say now? Where is their fa- mous cruelty?"  
The Germans were already in our town, the Fascists were al- ready in power, the verdict was already out—and the Jews of Sighet were still smiling.  
THE EIGHT DAYS of Passover.  
The weather was sublime. My mother was busy in the kitchen. The synagogues were no longer open. People gathered in private homes: no need to provoke the Germans.  
Almost every rabbi's home became a house of prayer. We drank, we ate, we sang. The Bible commands us to rejoice during the eight days of celebration, but our hearts were not in it. We wished the holiday would end so as not to have to pretend.  
On the seventh day of Passover, the curtain finally rose: the Germans arrested the leaders of the Jewish community.  
From that moment on, everything happened very quickly. The race toward death had begun.  
First edict: Jews were prohibited from leaving their residences for three days, under penalty of death.  
Moishe the Beadle came running to our house. "I warned you," he shouted. And left without waiting for a response.  
The same day, the Hungarian police burst into every Jewish home in town: a Jew was henceforth forbidden to own gold, jew-  
10  
elry, or any valuables. Everything had to be handed over to the authorities, under penalty of death. My father went down to the cellar and buried our savings.  
As for my mother, she went on tending to the many chores in the house. Sometimes she would stop and gaze at us in silence.  
Three days later, a new decree: every Jew had to wear the yel- low star.  
Some prominent members of the community came to consult with my father, who had connections at the upper levels of the Hungarian police; they wanted to know what he thought of the situation. My father's view was that it was not all bleak, or per- haps he just did not want to discourage the others, to throw salt on their wounds:  
"The yellow star? So what? It's not l e t h a l ... " (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?) But new edicts were already being issued. We no longer had the right to frequent restaurants or cafes, to travel by rail, to attend synagogue, to be on the streets after six o'clock in the evening.  
Then came the ghettos.  
TWO GHETTOS were created in Sighet. A large one in the center of town occupied four streets, and another smaller one extended over several alleyways on the outskirts of town. The street we lived on, Serpent Street, was in the first ghetto. We therefore could remain in our house. But, as it occupied a corner, the win- dows facing the street outside the ghetto had to be sealed. We gave some of our rooms to relatives who had been driven out of their homes.  
Little by little life returned to "normal." The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing; we were entirely among ourselves. A  
11  
small Jewish r e p u b l i c ... A Jewish Council was appointed, as well as a Jewish police force, a welfare agency, a labor committee, a health agency—a whole governmental apparatus.  
People thought this was a good thing. We would no longer have to look at all those hostile faces, endure those hate-filled stares. No more fear. No more anguish. We would live among Jews, among brothers...  
Of course, there still were unpleasant moments. Every day, the Germans came looking for men to load coal into the military trains. Volunteers for this kind of work were few. But apart from that, the atmosphere was oddly peaceful and reassuring.  
Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.  
SOME TWO WEEKS before Shavuot. A sunny spring day, people strolled seemingly carefree through the crowded streets. They exchanged cheerful greetings. Children played games, rolling hazelnuts on the sidewalks. Some schoolmates and I were in Ezra Malik's garden studying a Talmudic treatise.  
Night fell. Some twenty people had gathered in our courtyard. My father was sharing some anecdotes and holding forth on his opinion of the situation. He was a good storyteller.  
Suddenly, the gate opened, and Stern, a former shopkeeper who now was a policeman, entered and took my father aside. De- spite the growing darkness, I could see my father turn pale.  
"What's wrong?" we asked. "I don't know. I have been summoned to a special meeting of the Council. Something must have happened."  
The story he had interrupted would remain unfinished.  
12  
"I'm going right now," he said. "I'll return as soon as possible. I'll tell you everything. Wait for me."  
We were ready to wait as long as necessary. The courtyard turned into something like an antechamber to an operating room. We stood, waiting for the door to open. Neighbors, hearing the ru- mors, had joined us. We stared at our watches. Time had slowed down. What was the meaning of such a long session?  
"I have a bad feeling," said my mother. "This afternoon I saw new faces in the ghetto. Two German officers, I believe they were Gestapo. Since we've been here, we have not seen a single of- ficer..."  
It was close to midnight. Nobody felt like going to sleep, though some people briefly went to check on their homes. Others left but asked to be called as soon as my father returned.  
At last, the door opened and he appeared. His face was drained of color. He was quickly surrounded.  
"Tell us. Tell us what's happening! Say something..." At that moment, we were so anxious to hear something en- couraging, a few words telling us that there was nothing to worry about, that the meeting had been routine, just a review of welfare and health problems...But one glance at my father's face left no doubt.  
"The news is terrible," he said at last. And then one word: "Transports."  
The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely. Departures were to take place street by street, starting the next day.  
We wanted to know everything, every detail. We were stunned, yet we wanted to fully absorb the bitter news.  
"Where will they take us?" That was a secret. A secret for all, except one: the president of the Jewish Council. But he would not tell, or could not tell. The Gestapo had threatened to shoot him if he talked.  
13  
"There are rumors," my father said, his voice breaking, "that we are being taken somewhere in Hungary to work in the brick factories. It seems that here, we are too close to the front..."  
After a moment's silence, he added: "Each of us will be allowed to bring his personal belong- ings. A backpack, some food, a few items of clothing. Nothing else."Again, heavy silence.  
"Go and wake the neighbors," said my father. "They must get ready..."  
The shadows around me roused themselves as if from a deep sleep and left silently in every direction.  
FOR A MOMENT, we remained alone. Suddenly Batia Reich, a rela- tive who lived with us, entered the room: "Someone is knocking at the sealed window, the one that faces outside!"  
It was only after the war that I found out who had knocked that night. It was an inspector of the Hungarian police, a friend of my father's. Before we entered the ghetto, he had told us, "Don't worry. I'll warn you if there is danger." Had he been able to speak to us that night, we might still have been able to flee...But by the time we succeeded in opening the window, it was too late. There was nobody outside.  
THE GHETTO was awake. One after the other, the lights were go- ing on behind the windows.  
I went into the house of one of my father's friends. I woke the head of the household, a man with a gray beard and the gaze of a dreamer. His back was hunched over from untold nights spent studying.  
14  
"Get up, sir, get up! You must ready yourself for the journey. Tomorrow you will be expelled, you and your family, you and all the other Jews. Where to? Please don't ask me, sir, don't ask ques- tions. God alone could answer you. For heaven's sake, get u p ... " He had no idea what I was talking about. He probably thought I had lost my mind.  
"What are you saying? Get ready for the journey? What jour- ney? Why? What is happening? Have you gone mad?"  
Half asleep, he was staring at me, his eyes filled with terror, as though he expected me to burst out laughing and tell him to go back to bed. To sleep. To dream. That nothing had happened. It was all in jest...  
My throat was dry and the words were choking me, paralyzing my lips. There was nothing else to say.  
At last he understood. He got out of bed and began to dress, automatically. Then he went over to the bed where his wife lay sleeping and with infinite tenderness touched her forehead. She opened her eyes and it seemed to me that a smile crossed her lips. Then he went to wake his two children. They woke with a start, torn from their dreams. I fled.  
Time went by quickly. It was already four o'clock in the morn- ing. My father was running right and left, exhausted, consoling friends, checking with the Jewish Council just in case the order had been rescinded. To the last moment, people clung to hope.  
The women were boiling eggs, roasting meat, preparing cakes, sewing backpacks. The children were wandering about aimlessly, not knowing what to do with themselves to stay out of the way of the grown-ups.  
Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds—pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificent blue sky.  
15  
By eight o'clock in the morning, weariness had settled into our veins, our limbs, our brains, like molten lead. I was in the midst of prayer when suddenly there was shouting in the streets. I quickly unwound my phylacteries and ran to the window. Hungarian po- lice had entered the ghetto and were yelling in the street nearby.  
"All Jews, outside! Hurry!" They were followed by Jewish police, who, their voices break- ing, told us:  
"The time has c o m e ... y o u must leave all t h i s ... " The Hungarian police used their rifle butts, their clubs to in- discriminately strike old men and women, children and cripples.  
One by one, the houses emptied and the streets filled with peo- ple carrying bundles. By ten o'clock, everyone was outside. The police were taking roll calls, once, twice, twenty times. The heat was oppressive. Sweat streamed from people's faces and bodies.  
Children were crying for water. Water! There was water close by inside the houses, the back- yards, but it was forbidden to break rank.  
"Water, Mother, I am thirsty!" Some of the Jewish police surreptitiously went to fill a few jugs. My sisters and I were still allowed to move about, as we were destined for the last convoy, and so we helped as best we could.  
AT LAST, at one o'clock in the afternoon came the signal to leave. There was joy, yes, joy. People must have thought there could be no greater torment in God's hell than that of being stranded here, on the sidewalk, among the bundles, in the middle of the street under a blazing sun. Anything seemed preferable to that. They began to walk without another glance at the abandoned streets, the dead, empty houses, the gardens, the tombstones...  
16  
On everyone's back, there was a sack. In everyone's eyes, tears and distress. Slowly, heavily, the procession advanced toward the gate of the ghetto.  
And there I was, on the sidewalk, watching them file past, un- able to move. Here came the Chief Rabbi, hunched over, his face strange looking without a beard, a bundle on his back. His very presence in the procession was enough to make the scene seem surreal. It was like a page torn from a book, a historical novel, per- haps, dealing with the captivity in Babylon or the Spanish Inqui- sition.  
They passed me by, one after the other, my teachers, my friends, the others, some of whom I had once feared, some of whom I had found ridiculous, all those whose lives I had shared for years. There they went, defeated, their bundles, their lives in tow, having left behind their homes, their childhood.  
They passed me by, like beaten dogs, with never a glance in my direction. They must have envied me.  
The procession disappeared around the corner. A few steps more and they were beyond the ghetto walls.  
The street resembled fairgrounds deserted in haste. There was a little of everything: suitcases, briefcases, bags, knives, dishes, banknotes, papers, faded portraits. All the things one planned to take along and finally left behind. They had ceased to matter.  
Open rooms everywhere. Gaping doors and windows looked out into the void. It all belonged to everyone since it no longer belonged to anyone. It was there for the taking. An open tomb.  
A summer sun.  
WE HAD SPENT the day without food. But we were not really hun- gry. We were exhausted.  
17  
My father had accompanied the deportees as far as the ghetto's gate. They first had been herded through the main syna- gogue, where they were thoroughly searched to make sure they were not carrying away gold, silver, or any other valuables. There had been incidents of hysteria and harsh blows.  
"When will it be our turn?" I asked my father. "The day after tomorrow. Unless...things work out. A mira- cle, perhaps..."  
Where were the people being taken? Did anyone know yet? No, the secret was well kept.  
Night had fallen. That evening, we went to bed early. My fa- ther said:  
"Sleep peacefully, children. Nothing will happen until the day after tomorrow, Tuesday."  
Monday went by like a small summer cloud, like a dream in the first hours of dawn.  
Intent on preparing our backpacks, on baking breads and cakes, we no longer thought about anything. The verdict had been delivered.  
That evening, our mother made us go to bed early. To con- serve our strength, she said.  
It was to be the last night spent in our house. I was up at dawn. I wanted to have time to pray before leaving.  
My father had risen before all of us, to seek information in town. He returned around eight o'clock. Good news: we were not leaving town today; we were only moving to the small ghetto. That is where we were to wait for the last transport. We would be the last to leave.  
At nine o'clock, the previous Sunday's scenes were repeated. Policemen wielding clubs were shouting:  
"All Jews outside!"  
18  
We were ready. I went out first. I did not want to look at my parents' faces. I did not want to break into tears. We remained sit- ting in the middle of the street, like the others two days earlier. The same hellish sun. The same thirst. Only there was no one left to bring us water.  
I looked at my house in which I had spent years seeking my God, fasting to hasten the coming of the Messiah, imagining what my life would be like later. Yet I felt little sadness. My mind was empty.  
"Get up! Roll call!" We stood. We were counted. We sat down. We got up again. Over and over. We waited impatiently to be taken away. What were they waiting for? Finally, the order came:  
"Forward! March!" My father was crying. It was the first time I saw him cry. I had never thought it possible. As for my mother, she was walking, her face a mask, without a word, deep in thought. I looked at my lit- tle sister, Tzipora, her blond hair neatly combed, her red coat over her arm: a little girl of seven. On her back a bag too heavy for her. She was clenching her teeth; she already knew it was useless to complain. Here and there, the police were lashing out with their clubs: "Faster!" I had no strength left. The journey had just be- gun and I already felt so weak...  
"Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!" the Hun- garian police were screaming.  
That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.  
They ordered us to run. We began to run. Who would have thought that we were so strong? From behind their windows, from behind their shutters, our fellow citizens watched as we passed.  
19  
We finally arrived at our destination. Throwing down our bun- dles, we dropped to the ground:  
"Oh God, Master of the Universe, in your infinite compassion, have mercy on u s ... "  
THE SMALL GHETTO. Only three days ago, people were living here. People who owned the things we were using now. They had been expelled. And we had already forgotten all about them.  
The chaos was even greater here than in the large ghetto. Its inhabitants evidently had been caught by surprise. I visited the rooms that had been occupied by my Uncle Mendel's family. On the table, a half-finished bowl of soup. A platter of dough waiting to be baked. Everywhere on the floor there were books. Had my uncle meant to take them along?  
We settled in. (What a word!) I went looking for wood, my sisters lit a fire. Despite her fatigue, my mother began to prepare a meal.  
We cannot give up, we cannot give up, she kept repeating. People's morale was not so bad: we were beginning to get used to the situation. There were those who even voiced optimism. The Germans were running out of time to expel us, they argued... Tragically for those who had already been deported, it would be too late. As for us, chances were that we would be allowed to go on with our miserable little lives until the end of the war.  
The ghetto was not guarded. One could enter and leave as one pleased. Maria, our former maid, came to see us. Sobbing, she begged us to come with her to her village where she had prepared a safe shelter.  
My father wouldn't hear of it. He told me and my big sisters, "If you wish, go there. I shall stay here with your mother and the little one...  
Naturally, we refused to be separated.  
20  
NIGHT. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was con- suming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.There was nothing else to do but to go to bed, in the beds of those who had moved on. We needed to rest, to gather our strength.  
At daybreak, the gloom had lifted. The mood was more confi- dent. There were those who said:  
"Who knows, they may be sending us away for our own good. The front is getting closer, we shall soon hear the guns. And then surely the civilian population will be evacuated..."  
"They worry lest we join the partisans..." "As far as I'm concerned, this whole business of deportation is nothing but a big farce. Don't laugh. They just want to steal our valuables and jewelry. They know that it has all been buried and that they will have to dig to find it; so much easier to do when the owners are on v a c a t i o n ... "  
On vacation! This kind of talk that nobody believed helped pass the time. The few days we spent here went by pleasantly enough, in rela- tive calm. People rather got along. There no longer was any dis- tinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate—still unknown.  
SATURDAY, the day of rest, was the day chosen for our expulsion.  
The night before, we had sat down to the traditional Friday night meal. We had said the customary blessings over the bread  
21  
and the wine and swallowed the food in silence. We sensed that we were gathered around the familial table for the last time. I spent that night going over memories and ideas and was unable to fall asleep.  
At dawn, we were in the street, ready to leave. This time, there were no Hungarian police. It had been agreed that the Jew- ish Council would handle everything by itself.  
Our convoy headed toward the main synagogue. The town seemed deserted. But behind the shutters, our friends of yester- day were probably waiting for the moment when they could loot our homes.  
The synagogue resembled a large railroad station: baggage and tears. The altar was shattered, the wall coverings shredded, the walls themselves bare. There were so many of us, we could hardly breathe. The twenty-four hours we spent there were horrendous. The men were downstairs, the women upstairs. It was Saturday— the Sabbath—and it was as though we were there to attend ser- vices. Forbidden to go outside, people relieved themselves in a corner.  
The next morning, we walked toward the station, where a convoy of cattle cars was waiting. The Hungarian police made us climb into the cars, eighty persons in each one. They handed us some bread, a few pails of water. They checked the bars on the windows to make sure they would not come loose. The cars were sealed. One person was placed in charge of every car: if someone managed to escape, that person would be shot.  
Two Gestapo officers strolled down the length of the platform. They were all smiles; all things considered, it had gone very smoothly.  
A prolonged whistle pierced the air. The wheels began to grind. We were on our way.  
L  
22  
LYING DOWN was not an option, nor could we all sit down. We decided to take turns sitting. There was little air. The lucky ones found themselves near a window; they could watch the blooming countryside flit by.  
After two days of travel, thirst became intolerable, as did the heat.Freed of normal constraints, some of the young let go of their inhibitions and, under cover of darkness, caressed one another, without any thought of others, alone in the world. The others pre- tended not to notice.  
There was still some food left. But we never ate enough to satisfy our hunger. Our principle was to economize, to save for tomorrow. Tomorrow could be worse yet.  
The train stopped in Kaschau, a small town on the Czechoslo- vakian border. We realized then that we were not staying in Hun- gary. Our eyes opened. Too late.  
The door of the car slid aside. A German officer stepped in accompanied by a Hungarian lieutenant, acting as his interpreter. "From this moment on, you are under the authority of the  
23  
German Army. Anyone who still owns gold, silver, or watches must hand them over now. Anyone who will be found to have kept any of these will be shot on the spot. Secondly, anyone who is ill should report to the hospital car. That's all."  
The Hungarian lieutenant went around with a basket and re- trieved the last possessions from those who chose not to go on tasting the bitterness of fear.  
"There are eighty of you in the car," the German officer added. "If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."  
The two disappeared. The doors clanked shut. We had fallen into the trap, up to our necks. The doors were nailed, the way back irrevocably cut off. The world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car.  
THERE WAS A WOMAN among us, a certain Mrs. Schächter. She was in her fifties and her ten-year-old son was with her, crouched in a corner. Her husband and two older sons had been deported with the first transport, by mistake. The separation had totally shattered her.  
I knew her well. A quiet, tense woman with piercing eyes, she had been a frequent guest in our house. Her husband was a pious man who spent most of his days and nights in the house of study. It was she who supported the family.  
Mrs. Schächter had lost her mind. On the first day of the jour- ney, she had already begun to moan. She kept asking why she had been separated from her family. Later, her sobs and screams be- came hysterical.  
On the third night, as we were sleeping, some of us sitting, huddled against each other, some of us standing, a piercing cry broke the silence:  
"Fire! I see a fire! I see a fire!"24  
There was a moment of panic. Who had screamed? It was Mrs. Schächter. Standing in the middle of the car, in the faint light fil- tering through the windows, she looked like a withered tree in a field of wheat. She was howling, pointing through the window:  
"Look! Look at this fire! This terrible fire! Have mercy on me!"Some pressed against the bars to see. There was nothing. Only the darkness of night.  
It took us a long time to recover from this harsh awakening. We were still trembling, and with every screech of the wheels, we felt the abyss opening beneath us. Unable to still our anguish, we tried to reassure each other:  
"She is mad, poor w o m a n ... " Someone had placed a damp rag on her forehead. But she nev- ertheless continued to scream:  
"Fire! I see a fire!" Her little boy was crying, clinging to her skirt, trying to hold her hand:  
"It's nothing, Mother! There's nothing there...Please sit d o w n ... " He pained me even more than did his mother's cries.  
Some of the women tried to calm her: "You'll see, you'll find your husband and sons a g a i n ... I n a few d a y s ... "  
She continued to scream and sob fitfully. "Jews, listen to me," she cried. "I see a fire! I see flames, huge flames!"  
It was as though she were possessed by some evil spirit. We tried to reason with her, more to calm ourselves, to catch our breath, than to soothe her:  
"She is hallucinating because she is thirsty, poor w o m a n ... That's why she speaks of flames devouring h e r ... "  
But it was all in vain. Our terror could no longer be contained.  
25  
Our nerves had reached a breaking point. Our very skin was aching. It was as though madness had infected all of us. We gave up. A few young men forced her to sit down, then bound and gagged her.  
Silence fell again. The small boy sat next to his mother, crying. I started to breathe normally again as I listened to the rhythmic pounding of the wheels on the tracks as the train raced through the night. We could begin to doze again, to rest, to dream...  
And so an hour or two passed. Another scream jolted us. The woman had broken free of her bonds and was shouting louder than before:  
"Look at the fire! Look at the flames! Flames everywhere..." Once again, the young men bound and gagged her. When they actually struck her, people shouted their approval:  
"Keep her quiet! Make that madwoman shut up. She's not the only one h e r e ... "  
She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal. Her son was clinging desperately to her, not uttering a word. He was no longer crying.  
The night seemed endless. By daybreak, Mrs. Schächter had settled down. Crouching in her corner, her blank gaze fixed on some faraway place, she no longer saw us.  
She remained like that all day, mute, absent, alone in the midst of us. Toward evening she began to shout again:  
"The fire, over there!" She was pointing somewhere in the distance, always the same place. No one felt like beating her anymore. The heat, the thirst, the stench, the lack of air, were suffocating us. Yet all that was nothing compared to her screams, which tore us apart. A few more days and all of us would have started to scream.  
26  
But we were pulling into a station. Someone near a window read to us:  
"Auschwitz." Nobody had ever heard that name.  
THE TRAIN did not move again. The afternoon went by slowly. Then the doors of the wagon slid open. Two men were given per- mission to fetch water.  
When they came back, they told us that they had learned, in exchange for a gold watch, that this was the final destination. We were to leave the train here. There was a labor camp on the site. The conditions were good. Families would not be separated. Only the young would work in the factories. The old and the sick would find work in the fields.  
Confidence soared. Suddenly we felt free of the previous nights' terror. We gave thanks to God.  
Mrs. Schächter remained huddled in her corner, mute, un- touched by the optimism around her. Her little one was stroking her hand.  
Dusk began to fill the wagon. We ate what was left of our food. At ten o'clock in the evening, we were all trying to find a position for a quick nap and soon we were dozing. Suddenly:  
"Look at the fire! Look at the flames! Over there!" With a start, we awoke and rushed to the window yet again. We had believed her, if only for an instant. But there was nothing outside but darkness. We returned to our places, shame in our souls but fear gnawing at us nevertheless. As she went on howl- ing, she was struck again. Only with great difficulty did we suc- ceed in quieting her down.  
The man in charge of our wagon called out to a German officer  
27  
strolling down the platform, asking him to have the sick woman moved to a hospital car.  
"Patience," the German replied, "patience. She'll be taken there soon."  
Around eleven o'clock, the train began to move again. We pressed against the windows. The convoy was rolling slowly. A quarter of an hour later, it began to slow down even more. Through the windows, we saw barbed wire; we understood that this was the camp.  
We had forgotten Mrs. Schächter's existence. Suddenly there was a terrible scream:  
"Jews, look! Look at the fire! Look at the flames!" And as the train stopped, this time we saw flames rising from a tall chimney into a black sky.  
Mrs. Schächter had fallen silent on her own. Mute again, indif- ferent, absent, she had returned to her corner.  
We stared at the flames in the darkness. A wretched stench floated in the air. Abruptly, our doors opened. Strange-looking creatures, dressed in striped jackets and black pants, jumped into the wagon. Holding flashlights and sticks, they began to strike at us left and right, shouting:  
"Everybody out! Leave everything inside. Hurry up!" We jumped out. I glanced at Mrs. Schächter. Her little boy was still holding her hand.  
In front of us, those flames. In the air, the smell of burning flesh. It must have been around midnight. We had arrived. In Birkenau.  
T  
28  
THE BELOVED OBJECTS that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions. Every few yards, there stood an SS man, his machine gun trained on us. Hand in hand we followed the throng.  
An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded: "Men to the left! Women to the right!" Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my fa- ther's hand press against mine: we were alone. In a fraction of a second I could see my mother, my sisters, move to the right. Tzi- pora was holding Mother's hand. I saw them walking farther and farther away; Mother was stroking my sister's blond hair, as if to protect her. And I walked on with my father, with the men. I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever. I kept walk- ing, my father holding my hand.29  
Behind me, an old man fell to the ground. Nearby, an SS man replaced his revolver in its holster.  
My hand tightened its grip on my father. All I could think of was not to lose him. Not to remain alone.  
The SS officers gave the order. "Form ranks of fives!" There was a tumult. It was imperative to stay together. "Hey, kid, how old are you?" The man interrogating me was an inmate. I could not see his face, but his voice was weary and warm.  
"Fifteen." "No. You're eighteen." "But I'm not," I said. "I'm fifteen." "Fool. Listen to what I say." Then he asked my father, who answered: "I'm fifty." "No." The man now sounded angry. "Not fifty. You're forty. Do you hear? Eighteen and forty."  
He disappeared into the darkness. Another inmate appeared, unleashing a stream of invectives:  
"Sons of bitches, why have you come here? Tell me, why?" Someone dared to reply: "What do you think? That we came here of our own free will? That we asked to come here?"  
The other seemed ready to kill him: "Shut up, you moron, or I'll tear you to pieces! You should have hanged yourselves rather than come here. Didn't you know what was in store for you here in Auschwitz? You didn't know? In 1944?"  
True. We didn't know. Nobody had told us. He couldn't be- lieve his ears. His tone became even harsher:  
"Over there. Do you see the chimney over there? Do you see  
30  
it? And the flames, do you see them?" (Yes, we saw the flames.) "Over there, that's where they will take you. Over there will be your grave. You still don't understand? You sons of bitches. Don't you understand anything? You will be burned! Burned to a cin- der! Turned into ashes!"  
His anger changed into fury. We stood stunned, petrified. Could this be just a nightmare? An unimaginable nightmare?  
I heard whispers around me: "We must do something. We can't let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse. We must revolt."  
There were, among us, a few tough young men. They actually had knives and were urging us to attack the armed guards. One of them was muttering:  
"Let the world learn about the existence of Auschwitz. Let everybody find out about it while they still have a chance to es- cape"  
But the older men begged their sons not to be foolish: "We mustn't give up hope, even now as the sword hangs over our heads. So taught our s a g e s ... "  
The wind of revolt died down. We continued to walk until we came to a crossroads. Standing in the middle of it was, though I didn't know it then, Dr. Mengele, the notorious Dr. Mengele. He looked like the typical SS officer: a cruel, though not unintelli- gent, face, complete with monocle. He was holding a conductor's baton and was surrounded by officers. The baton was moving constantly, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.  
In no time, I stood before him. "Your age?" he asked, perhaps trying to sound paternal. "I'm eighteen." My voice was trembling. "In good health?" "Yes." "Your profession?"  
31  
Tell him that I was a student? "Farmer," I heard myself saying. This conversation lasted no more than a few seconds. It seemed like an eternity.  
The baton pointed to the left. I took half a step forward. I first wanted to see where they would send my father. Were he to have gone to the right, I would have run after him.  
The baton, once more, moved to the left. A weight lifted from my heart.  
We did not know, as yet, which was the better side, right or left, which road led to prison and which to the crematoria. Still, I was happy, I was near my father. Our procession continued slowly to move forward.  
Another inmate came over to us: "Satisfied?" "Yes," someone answered. "Poor devils, you are heading for the crematorium." He seemed to be telling the truth. Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own e y e s ... c h i l - dren thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)  
So that was where we were going. A little farther on, there was another, larger pit for adults.  
I pinched myself: Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A night- mare perhaps...Soon I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that I was back in the room of my childhood, with my books...  
My father's voice tore me from my daydreams:  
32  
"What a shame, a shame that you did not go with your m o t h e r ... I saw many children your age go with their m o t h e r s ... " His voice was terribly sad. I understood that he did not wish to see what they would do to me. He did not wish to see his only son go up in flames.  
My forehead was covered with cold sweat. Still, I told him that I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes...  
"The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, every- thing is possible, even the crematoria...His voice broke.  
"Father," I said. "If that is true, then I don't want to wait. I'll run into the electrified barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames."  
He didn't answer. He was weeping. His body was shaking. Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.  
"Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba...May His name be cele- brated and sanctified..." whispered my father.  
For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?  
We continued our march. We were coming closer and closer to the pit, from which an infernal heat was rising. Twenty more steps. If I was going to kill myself, this was the time. Our column had only some fifteen steps to go. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten more steps. Eight. Seven. We were walking slowly, as one follows a hearse, our own funeral procession. Only four more steps. Three. There it was now, very close to us, the pit and its flames. I gathered all that re-  
33  
mained of my strength in order to break rank and throw myself onto the barbed wire. Deep down, I was saying good-bye to my father, to the whole universe, and, against my will, I found myself whispering the words: "Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba...May His name be exalted and sanctified..." My heart was about to burst. There. I was face-to-face with the Angel of Death...  
No. Two steps from the pit, we were ordered to turn left and herded into barracks.  
I squeezed my father's hand. He said: "Do you remember Mrs. Schächter, in the train?"  
NEVER SHALL I FORGET that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.  
Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bod- ies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.  
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for- ever.Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.  
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.  
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.  
Never.  
THE BARRACK we had been assigned to was very long. On the roof, a few bluish skylights. I thought: This is what the antecham- ber of hell must look like. So many crazed men, so much shout- ing, so much brutality.  
34  
Dozens of inmates were there to receive us, sticks in hand, striking anywhere, anyone, without reason. The orders came:  
"Strip! Hurry up! Raus! Hold on only to your belt and your shoes..."  
Our clothes were to be thrown on the floor at the back of the barrack. There was a pile there already. New suits, old ones, torn overcoats, rags. For us it meant true equality: nakedness. We trembled in the cold.  
A few SS officers wandered through the room, looking for strong men. If vigor was that appreciated, perhaps one should try to appear sturdy? My father thought the opposite. Better not to draw attention. (We later found out that he had been right. Those who were selected that day were incorporated into the Sonder- Kommando, the Kommando working in the crematoria. Béla Katz, the son of an important merchant of my town, had arrived in Birkenau with the first transport, one week ahead of us. When he found out that we were there, he succeeded in slipping us a note. He told us that having been chosen because of his strength, he had been forced to place his own father's body into the furnace.)  
The blows continued to rain on us: "To the barber!" Belt and shoes in hand, I let myself be dragged along to the barbers. Their clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies. My head was buzzing; the same thought surfacing over and over: not to be separated from my father.  
Freed from the barbers' clutches, we began to wander about the crowd, finding friends, acquaintances. Every encounter filled us with joy—yes, joy: Thank God! You are still alive!  
Some were crying. They used whatever strength they had left to cry. Why had they let themselves be brought here? Why didn't they die in their beds? Their words were interspersed with sobs.  
35  
Suddenly someone threw his arms around me in a hug: Yehiel, the Sigheter rebbe's brother. He was weeping bitterly. I thought he was crying with joy at still being alive.  
"Don't cry, Yehiel," I said. "Don't waste your t e a r s ... " "Not cry? We're on the threshold of death. Soon, we shall be i n s i d e ... D o you understand? Inside. How could I not cry?"  
I watched darkness fade through the bluish skylights in the roof. I no longer was afraid. I was overcome by fatigue.  
The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them—who knows what happened to them?—but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self- defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.  
AROUND FIVE O'CLOCK in the morning, we were expelled from the barrack. The Kapos were beating us again, but I no longer felt the pain. A glacial wind was enveloping us. We were naked, hold- ing our shoes and belts. An order:  
"Run!" And we ran. After a few minutes of running, a new barrack.  
A barrel of foul-smelling liquid stood by the door. Disinfec- tion. Everybody soaked in it. Then came a hot shower. All very fast. As we left the showers, we were chased outside. And ordered to run some more. Another barrack: the storeroom. Very long ta- bles. Mountains of prison garb. As we ran, they threw the clothes at us: pants, jackets, shirts...  
36  
In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men. Had the situation not been so tragic, we might have laughed. We looked pretty strange! Meir Katz, a colossus, wore a child's pants, and Stern, a skinny little fellow, was floundering in a huge jacket. We immedi- ately started to switch.  
I glanced over at my father. How changed he looked! His eyes were veiled. I wanted to tell him something, but I didn't know what.The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded—and devoured—by a black flame.  
So many events had taken place in just a few hours that I had completely lost all notion of time. When had we left our homes? And the ghetto? And the train? Only a week ago? One night? One single night?  
How long had we been standing in the freezing wind? One hour? A single hour? Sixty minutes?  
Surely it was a dream.  
NOT FAR FROM US, prisoners were at work. Some were digging holes, others were carrying sand. None as much as glanced at us. We were withered trees in the heart of the desert. Behind me, people were talking. I had no desire to listen to what they were saying, or to know who was speaking and what about. Nobody dared raise his voice, even though there was no guard around. We whispered. Perhaps because of the thick smoke that poisoned the air and stung the throat.  
We were herded into yet another barrack, inside the Gypsy camp. We fell into ranks of five.  
37  
"And now, stop moving!" There was no floor. A roof and four walls. Our feet sank into the mud.  
Again, the waiting. I fell asleep standing up. I dreamed of a bed, of my mother's hand on my face. I woke: I was standing, my feet in the mud. Some people collapsed, sliding into the mud. Others shouted:  
"Are you crazy? We were told to stand. Do you want to get us all in trouble?"  
As if all the troubles in the world were not already upon us. Little by little, we all sat down in the mud. But we had to get up whenever a Kapo came in to check if, by chance, somebody had a new pair of shoes. If so, we had to hand them over. No use protesting; the blows multiplied and, in the end, one still had to hand them over.  
I had new shoes myself. But as they were covered with a thick coat of mud, they had not been noticed. I thanked God, in an im- provised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and won- drous universe.  
Suddenly, the silence became more oppressive. An SS officer had come in and, with him, the smell of the Angel of Death. We stared at his fleshy lips. He harangued us from the center of the barrack:  
"You are in a concentration camp. In Auschwitz... A pause. He was observing the effect his words had produced. His face remains in my memory to this day. A tall man, in his thir- ties, crime written all over his forehead and his gaze. He looked at us as one would a pack of leprous dogs clinging to life.  
"Remember," he went on. "Remember it always, let it be graven in your memories. You are in Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It is a concentration camp. Here, you  
38  
must work. If you don't you will go straight to the chimney. To the crematorium. Work or crematorium—the choice is yours."  
We had already lived through a lot that night. We thought that nothing could frighten us anymore. But his harsh words sent shiv- ers through us. The word "chimney" here was not an abstraction; it floated in the air, mingled with the smoke. It was, perhaps, the only word that had a real meaning in this place. He left the bar- rack. The Kapos arrived, shouting:  
"All specialists—locksmiths, carpenters, electricians, watch- makers—one step forward!"  
The rest of us were transferred to yet another barrack, this one of stone. We had permission to sit down. A Gypsy inmate was in charge.  
My father suddenly had a colic attack. He got up and asked politely, in German,"Excuse m e ... C o u l d you tell me where the toilets are located?"  
The Gypsy stared at him for a long time, from head to toe. As if he wished to ascertain that the person addressing him was actu- ally a creature of flesh and bone, a human being with a body and a belly. Then, as if waking from a deep sleep, he slapped my fa- ther with such force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours.  
I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal's flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me. All I could think was: I shall never forgive them for this. My father must have guessed my thoughts, because he whispered in my ear:  
"It doesn't hurt." His cheek still bore the red mark of the hand.  
39  
"EVERYBODY outside!"  
A dozen or so Gypsies had come to join our guard. The clubs and whips were cracking around me. My feet were running on their own. I tried to protect myself from the blows by hiding be- hind others. It was spring. The sun was shining.  
"Fall in, five by five!" The prisoners I had glimpsed that morning were working nearby. No guard in sight, only the chimney's s h a d o w ... L u l l e d by the sunshine and my dreams, I felt someone pulling at my sleeve. It was my father: "Come on, son."  
We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DAN- GER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was not in danger of death?  
The Gypsies had stopped next to a barrack. They were re- placed by SS men, who encircled us with machine guns and po- lice dogs.  
The march had lasted half an hour. Looking around me, I noticed that the barbed wire was behind us. We had left the camp.  
It was a beautiful day in May. The fragrances of spring were in the air. The sun was setting.  
But no sooner had we taken a few more steps than we saw the barbed wire of another camp. This one had an iron gate with the overhead inscription: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work makes you free.Auschwitz.  
40  
FIRST IMPRESSION: better than Birkenau. Cement buildings with two stories rather than wooden barracks. Little gardens here and there. We were led toward one of those "blocks." Seated on the ground by the entrance, we began to wait again. From time to time somebody was allowed to go in. These were the showers, a compulsory routine. Going from one camp to the other, several times a day, we had, each time, to go through them.  
After the hot shower, we stood shivering in the darkness. Our clothes had been left behind; we had been promised other clothes.  
Around midnight, we were told to run. "Faster!" yelled our guards. "The faster you run, the faster you'll get to go to sleep."  
After a few minutes of racing madly, we came to a new block. The man in charge was waiting. He was a young Pole, who was smiling at us. He began to talk to us and, despite our weariness, we listened attentively.  
"Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Ausch- witz. Ahead of you lies a long road paved with suffering. Don't lose hope. You have already eluded the worst danger: the selec- tion. Therefore, muster your strength and keep your faith. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life, a thousand times faith. By driving out despair, you will move away from death. Hell does not last forever...And now, here is a prayer, or rather a piece of advice: let there be camaraderie among you. We are all brothers and share the same fate. The same smoke hovers over all our heads. Help each other. That is the only way to sur- vive. And now, enough said, you are tired. Listen: you are in Block 17; I am responsible for keeping order here. Anyone with a complaint may come to see me. That is all. Go to sleep. Two peo- ple to a bunk. Good night."  
Those were the first human words.  
41  
NO SOONER HAD WE CLIMBED into our bunks than we fell into a deep sleep.  
The next morning, the "veteran" inmates treated us without brutality. We went to wash. We were given new clothing. They brought us black coffee.  
We left the block around ten o'clock so it could be cleaned. Outside, the sun warmed us. Our morale was much improved. A good night's sleep had done its work. Friends met, exchanged a few sentences. We spoke of everything without ever mentioning those who had disappeared. The prevailing opinion was that the war was about to end.  
At about noon, we were brought some soup, one bowl of thick soup for each of us. I was terribly hungry, yet I refused to touch it. I was still the spoiled child of long ago. My father swallowed my ration.We then had a short nap in the shade of the block. That SS of- ficer in the muddy barrack must have been lying: Auschwitz was, after all, a convalescent home...  
In the afternoon, they made us line up. Three prisoners brought a table and some medical instruments. We were told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. The three "vet- eran" prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.  
At dusk, a roll call. The work Kommandos had returned. The orchestra played military marches near the camp entrance. Tens of thousands of inmates stood in rows while the SS checked their numbers.  
After the roll call, the prisoners from all the blocks dispersed, looking for friends, relatives, or neighbors among the arrivals of the latest convoy.  
42  
DAYS WENT BY. In the mornings: black coffee. At midday: soup. By the third day, I was eagerly eating any kind of s o u p ... A t six o'clock in the afternoon: roll call. Followed by bread with some- thing. At nine o'clock: bedtime.  
We had already been in Auschwitz for eight days. It was after roll call. We stood waiting for the bell announcing its end. Sud- denly I noticed someone passing between the rows. I heard him ask:  
"Who among you is Wiesel from Sighet?" The person looking for us was a small fellow with spectacles in a wizened face. My father answered:  
"That's me. Wiesel from Sighet." The fellow's eyes narrowed. He took a long look at my father. "You don't know m e ? ... Y o u don't recognize me. I'm your relative, Stein. Already forgotten? Stein. Stein from Antwerp. Reizel's husband. Your wife was Reizel's a u n t ... S h e often wrote to u s ... and such letters!"  
My father had not recognized him. He must have barely known him, always being up to his neck in communal affairs and not knowledgeable in family matters. He was always elsewhere, lost in thought. (Once, a cousin came to see us in Sighet. She had stayed at our house and eaten at our table for two weeks before my father noticed her presence for the first time.) No, he did not remember Stein. I recognized him right away. I had known Reizel, his wife, before she had left for Belgium.  
He told us that he had been deported in 1942. He said, "I heard people say that a transport had arrived from your re- gion and I came to look for you. I thought you might have some news of Reizel and my two small boys who stayed in Antwerp..."  
43  
I knew nothing about them...Since 1940, my mother had not received a single letter from them. But I lied:  
"Yes, my mother did hear from them. Reizel is fine. So are the children..."  
He was weeping with joy. He would have liked to stay longer, to learn more details, to soak up the good news, but an SS was heading in our direction and he had to go, telling us that he would come back the next day.  
The bell announced that we were dismissed. We went to fetch the evening meal: bread and margarine. I was terribly hungry and swallowed my ration on the spot. My father told me, "You mustn't eat all at once. Tomorrow is another d a y ... "  
But seeing that his advice had come too late, and that there was nothing left of my ration, he didn't even start his own.  
"Me, I'm not hungry," he said.  
WE REMAINED IN AUSCHWITZ for three weeks. We had nothing to do. We slept a lot. In the afternoon and at night.  
Our one goal was to avoid the transports, to stay here as long as possible. It wasn't difficult; it was enough never to sign up as a skilled worker. The unskilled were kept until the end.  
At the start of the third week, our Blockälteste was removed; he was judged too humane. The new one was ferocious and his aides were veritable monsters. The good days were over. We began to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to let ourselves be chosen for the next transport.  
Stein, our relative from Antwerp, continued to visit us and, from time to time, he would bring a half portion of bread:  
"Here, this is for you, Eliezer." Every time he came, tears would roll down his icy cheeks. He would often say to my father:  
44  
"Take care of your son. He is very weak, very dehydrated. Take care of yourselves, you must avoid selection. Eat! Anything, anytime. Eat all you can. The weak don't last very long around here..."  
And he himself was so thin, so withered, so weak... "The only thing that keeps me alive," he kept saying, "is to know that Reizel and the little ones are still alive. Were it not for them, I would give up."  
One evening, he came to see us, his face radiant. "A transport just arrived from Antwerp. I shall go to see them tomorrow. Surely they will have n e w s ... "  
He left. We never saw him again. He had been given the news. The real news.  
EVENINGS, AS WE LAY on our cots, we sometimes tried to sing a few Hasidic melodies. Akiba Drumer would break our hearts with his deep, grave voice.  
Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.  
Akiba Drumer said: "God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within our- selves. We have no right to despair. And if He punishes us merci- lessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much m o r e ... "  
Hersh Genud, well versed in Kabbalah, spoke of the end of the world and the coming of the Messiah.  
From time to time, in the middle of all that talk, a thought crossed my mind: Where is Mother right now...and Tzipora...  
45  
"Mother is still a young woman," my father once said. "She must be in a labor camp. And Tzipora, she is a big girl now. She too must be in a c a m p ... "  
How we would have liked to believe that. We pretended, for what if one of us still did believe?  
ALL THE SKILLED WORKERS had already been sent to other camps. Only about a hundred of us, simple laborers, were left.  
"Today, it's your turn," announced the block secretary. "You are leaving with the next transport."  
At ten o'clock, we were handed our daily ration of bread. A dozen or so SS surrounded us. At the gate, the sign proclaimed that work meant freedom. We were counted. And there we were, in the countryside, on a sunny road. In the sky, a few small white clouds.  
We were walking slowly. The guards were in no hurry. We were glad of it. As we were passing through some of the villages, many Germans watched us, showing no surprise. No doubt they had seen quite a few of these processions...  
On the way, we saw some young German girls. The guards be- gan to tease them. The girls giggled. They allowed themselves to be kissed and tickled, bursting with laughter. They all were laughing, joking, and passing love notes to one another. At least, during all that time, we endured neither shouting nor blows.  
After four hours, we arrived at the new camp: Buna. The iron gate closed behind us.  
T  
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THE CAMP looked as though it had been through an epi- demic: empty and dead. Only a few "well-dressed" in- mates were wandering between the blocks. Of course, we first had to pass through the showers. The head of the camp joined us there. He was a stocky man with big shoul- ders, the neck of a bull, thick lips, and curly hair. He gave an im- pression of kindness. From time to time, a smile would linger in his gray-blue eyes. Our convoy included a few ten- and twelve- year-olds. The officer took an interest in them and gave orders to bring them food.  
We were given new clothing and settled in two tents. We were to wait there until we could be incorporated into work Komman- dos. Then we would be assigned to a block.  
In the evening, the Kommandos returned from the work yards. Roll call. We began looking for people we knew, asking the "veterans" which work Kommandos were the best and which block one should try to enter. All the inmates agreed:  
"Buna is a very good camp. One can hold one's own here. The  
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most important thing is not to be assigned to the construction Kommando..."  
As if we had a choice... Our tent leader was a German. An assassin's face, fleshy lips, hands resembling a wolf's paws. The camp's food had agreed with him; he could hardly move, he was so fat. Like the head of the camp, he liked children. Immediately after our arrival, he had bread brought for them, some soup and margarine. (In fact, this affection was not entirely altruistic; there existed here a veri- table traffic of children among homosexuals, I learned later.) He told us:  
"You will stay with me for three days in quarantine. Afterward, you will go to work. Tomorrow: medical checkup."  
One of his aides—a tough-looking boy with shifty eyes—came over to me:  
"Would you like to get into a good Kommando?" "Of course. But on one condition: I want to stay with my father."  
"All right," he said. "I can arrange it. For a pittance: your shoes. I'll give you another pair."  
I refused to give him my shoes. They were all I had left. "I'll also give you a ration of bread with some margarine..." He liked my shoes; I would not let him have them. Later, they were taken from me anyway. In exchange for nothing, that time.The medical checkup took place outside, early in the morn- ing, before three doctors seated on a bench.  
The first hardly examined me. He just asked: "Are you in good health?" Who would have dared to admit the opposite? On the other hand, the dentist seemed more conscientious: he asked me to open my mouth wide. In fact, he was not looking for  
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decay but for gold teeth. Those who had gold in their mouths were listed  
by their number. I did have a gold crown. The first three days went by quickly. On the fourth day, as we stood in front of our tent, the Kapos appeared. Each one began to choose the men he liked:  
" Y o u ... y o u ... y o u ... " They pointed their fingers, the way one might choose cattle, or merchandise.  
We followed our Kapo, a young man. He made us halt at the door of the first block, near the entrance to the camp. This was the orchestra's block. He motioned us inside. We were surprised; what had we to do with music?  
The orchestra was playing a military march, always the same. Dozens of Kommandos were marching off, in step, to the work yards. The Kapos were beating the time:  
"Left, right, left, right." SS officers, pen in hand, recorded the number of men leaving. The orchestra continued to play the same march until the last Kommando had passed. Then the conductor's baton stopped moving and the orchestra fell silent. The Kapo yelled:  
"Fall in!" We fell into ranks of five, with the musicians. We left the camp without music but in step. We still had the march in our ears.  
"Left, right, left, right!" We struck up conversations with our neighbors, the musicians. Almost all of them were Jews. Juliek, a Pole with eyeglasses and a cynical smile in a pale face. Louis, a native of Holland, a well- known violinist. He complained that they would not let him play Beethoven; Jews were not allowed to play German music. Hans, the young man from Berlin, was full of wit. The foreman was a Pole: Franek, a former student in Warsaw.  
Juliek explained to me, "We work in a warehouse of electrical materials, not far from here. The work is neither difficult nor dan-  
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gerous. Only Idek, the Kapo, occasionally has fits of madness, and then you'd better stay out of his way."  
"You are lucky, little fellow," said Hans, smiling. "You fell into a good Kommando..."  
Ten minutes later, we stood in front of the warehouse. A Ger- man employee, a civilian, the Meister, came to meet us. He paid as much attention to us as would a shopkeeper receiving a delivery of old rags.  
Our comrades were right. The work was not difficult. Sitting on the ground, we counted bolts, bulbs, and various small electri- cal parts. The Kapo launched into a lengthy explanation of the importance of this work, warning us that anyone who proved to be lazy would be held accountable. My new comrades reassured me:  
"Don't worry. He has to say this because of the Meister." There were many Polish civilians here and a few French- women as well. The women silently greeted the musicians with their eyes.  
Franek, the foreman, assigned me to a corner: "Don't kill yourself. There's no hurry. But watch out. Don't let an SS catch you."  
"Please, s i r ... I ' d like to be near my father." "All right. Your father will work here, next to you." We were lucky. Two boys came to join our group: Yossi and Tibi, two brothers from Czechoslovakia whose parents had been exterminated in Birkenau. They lived for each other, body and soul.  
They quickly became my friends. Having once belonged to a Zionist youth organization, they knew countless Hebrew songs. And so we would sometimes hum melodies evoking the gentle waters of the Jordan River and the majestic sanctity of Jerusalem. We also spoke often about Palestine. Their parents, like mine, had not had the courage to sell everything and emigrate while  
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there was still time. We decided that if we were allowed to live until the Liberation, we would not stay another day in Europe. We would board the first ship to Haifa.  
Still lost in his Kabbalistic dreams, Akiba Drumer had discov- ered a verse from the Bible which, translated into numbers, made it possible for him to predict Redemption in the weeks to come.  
WE HAD LEFT THE TENTS for the musicians' block. We now were entitled to a blanket, a washbowl, and a bar of soap. The Blockäl- teste was a German Jew.  
It was good to have a Jew as your leader. His name was Alphonse. A young man with a startlingly wizened face. He was totally devoted to defending "his" block. Whenever he could, he would "organize" a cauldron of soup for the young, for the weak, for all those who dreamed more of an extra portion of food than of liberty.  
ONE DAY, when we had just returned from the warehouse, I was summoned by the block secretary:  
"A-7713?" "That's me." "After your meal, you'll go to see the dentist." " B u t ... I don't have a toothache..." "After your meal. Without fail." I went to the infirmary block. Some twenty prisoners were waiting in line at the entrance. It didn't take long to learn the rea- son for our summons: our gold teeth were to be extracted.  
The dentist, a Jew from Czechoslovakia, had a face not unlike a death mask. When he opened his mouth, one had a ghastly vi- sion of yellow, rotten teeth. Seated in the chair, I asked meekly:  
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"What are you going to do, sir?" "I shall remove your gold crown, that's all," he said, clearly in- different.  
I thought of pretending to be sick: "Couldn't you wait a few days, sir? I don't feel well, I have a fever..."  
He wrinkled his brow, thought for a moment, and took my pulse.  
"All right, son. Come back to see me when you feel better. But don't wait for me to call you!"  
I went back to see him a week later. With the same excuse: I still was not feeling better. He did not seem surprised, and I don't know whether he believed me. Yet he most likely was pleased that I had come back on my own, as I had promised. He granted me a further delay.  
A few days after my visit, the dentist's office was shut down. He had been thrown into prison and was about to be hanged. It appeared that he had been dealing in the prisoners' gold teeth for his own benefit. I felt no pity for him. In fact, I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe. It could be useful to me one day, to buy something, some bread or even time to live. At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup— those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.  
IN THE WAREHOUSE, I often worked next to a young French- woman. We did not speak: she did not know German and I did not understand French.  
I thought she looked Jewish, though she passed for "Aryan." She was a forced labor inmate.  
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One day when Idek was venting his fury, I happened to cross his path. He threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more violent blows, until I was covered in blood. As I bit my lips in order not to howl with pain, he must have mistaken my silence for defiance and so he contin- ued to hit me harder and harder.  
Abruptly, he calmed down and sent me back to work as if nothing had happened. As if we had taken part in a game in which both roles were of equal importance.  
I dragged myself to my corner. I was aching all over. I felt a cool hand wiping the blood from my forehead. It was the French girl. She was smiling her mournful smile as she slipped me a crust of bread. She looked straight into my eyes. I knew she wanted to talk to me but that she was paralyzed with fear. She remained like that for some time, and then her face lit up and she said, in almost perfect German:  
"Bite your lips, little brother...Don't cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not n o w ... W a i t . Clench your teeth and w a i t ... "  
MANY YEARS LATER, in Paris, I sat in the Metro, reading my news- paper. Across the aisle, a beautiful woman with dark hair and dreamy eyes. I had seen those eyes before. "Madame, don't you recognize me?" "I don't know you, sir." "In 1944, you were in Poland, in Buna, weren't you?" "Yes, b u t ... " "You worked in a depot, a warehouse for electrical p a r t s ... " "Yes," she said, looking troubled. And then, after a moment of silence: "Wait...I do remember..."  
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"Idek, the K a p o ... t h e young Jewish b o y ... y o u r sweet words..."  
We left the Métro together and sat down at a café terrace. We spent the whole evening reminiscing. Before parting, I said, "May I ask one more question?"  
"I know what it is: Am I J e w i s h ... ? Yes, I am. From an obser- vant family. During the Occupation, I had false papers and passed as Aryan. And that was how I was assigned to a forced labor unit. When they deported me to Germany, I eluded being sent to a concentration camp. At the depot, nobody knew that I spoke Ger- man; it would have aroused suspicion. It was imprudent of me to say those few words to you, but I knew that you would not betray me..."  
ANOTHER TIME we were loading diesel motors onto freight cars under the supervision of some German soldiers. Idek was on edge, he had trouble restraining himself. Suddenly, he exploded. The victim this time was my father.  
"You old loafer!" he started yelling. "Is this what you call working?"  
And he began beating him with an iron bar. At first, my father simply doubled over under the blows, but then he seemed to break in two like an old tree struck by lightning.  
I had watched it all happening without moving. I kept silent. In fact, I thought of stealing away in order not to suffer the blows. What's more, if I felt anger at that moment, it was not directed at the Kapo but at my father. Why couldn't he have avoided Idek's wrath? That was what life in a concentration camp had made of me...  
Franek, the foreman, one day noticed the gold crown in my mouth:  
"Let me have your crown, kid."  
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I answered that I could not because without that crown I could no longer eat.  
"For what they give you to eat, k i d ... " I found another answer: my crown had been listed in the reg- ister during the medical checkup; this could mean trouble for us both."If you don't give me your crown, it will cost you much more!" All of a sudden, this pleasant and intelligent young man had changed. His eyes were shining with greed. I told him that I needed to get my father's advice.  
"Go ahead, kid, ask. But I want the answer by tomorrow." When I mentioned it to my father, he hesitated. After a long silence, he said:  
"No, my son. We cannot do this." "He will seek revenge!" "He won't dare, my son." Unfortunately, Franek knew how to handle this; he knew my weak spot. My father had never served in the military and could not march in step. But here, whenever we moved from one place to another, it was in step. That presented Franek with the oppor- tunity to torment him and, on a daily basis, to thrash him savagely. Left, right: he punched him. Left, right: he slapped him.  
I decided to give my father lessons in marching in step, in keeping time. We began practicing in front of our block. I would command: "Left, right!" and my father would try.  
The inmates made fun of us: "Look at the little officer, teach- ing the old man to march...Hey, little general, how many rations of bread does the old man give you for this?"  
But my father did not make sufficient progress, and the blows continued to rain on him.  
"So! You still don't know how to march in step, you old good- for-nothing?"  
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End file.
